Today ColdFusion moved into the next stage of its life and became a teenager, hopefully not a precocious one!

Happy 13^th Birthday ColdFusion.

Adobe ColdFusion has had a long and illustrious life. The first version of ColdFusion–written almost entirely by one person, JJ Allaire and then called “Cold Fusion”–was released in 1995. This first version, although revolutionising how web applications were built, was primitive by modern standards, doing little more than database access.

Although originally built in Visual C++, Allaire, around 1999, took the decision to rewrite the entire ColdFusion engine in Java–a project named “Neo”–which would allow for greater portability among different platforms. The rewrite, released under the monicker MX 6, would prove to be somewhat problematic and a wholescale update to the version resulted.

In 2001 Allaire was acquired by Macromedia. This union brought with it the integration of Macromedia’s Flash platform via Flash Remoting; a huge step towards rich Internet applications.

In 2005 it was the turn of Macromedia to be acquired and they merged with Adobe. A period of instability in the ColdFusion world resulted, brought about by the knowledge that Adobe was a company that developed tools, not programming languages. However, following a successful release of ColdFusion 8 in 2007 and the announcement that a version 9 would be developed, code-named “Centaur”, fears about ColdFusion’s future have subsided–albeit the continued debate over “ColdFusion is Dead” remains boiling in the background.

The primary distinguishing feature of ColdFusion is its associated scripting language, ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML), which compares favourably to its rivals, JSP, ASP.NET, or PHP and resembles HTML in syntax. “ColdFusion” is often used synonymously with “CFML”, but it should be noted that there are additional CFML application servers besides ColdFusion, and that ColdFusion supports programming languages other than CFML, such as server-side Actionscript and embedded scripts that can be written in a JavaScript-like language, known as CFScript. Adobe ColdFusion also includes native support for Flex, PDF, Verity and the embedded Derby database amongst a host of other features.

ColdFusion 9 is set to be an exciting release, much like its predecessor, with more features added to the core tag set, whilst also integrating other technologies such AIR and Hibernate.

Exciting times lay ahead. Let’s hope Adobe takes full advantage with such a fine product.

See Also:

• ColdFusion Wikipedia entry
• ColdFusion Markup Language Wikipedia entry
• Railo - Free, Open Source alternative CFML Engine
• SmithProject - Free, Open Source alternative CFML Engine
• BlueDragon - Free, Open Source alternative CFML Engine

I’m a ColdFusion freelance developer and as can often happen, I end up using a spare machine sitting in the corner of a room. Being relegated to the “dunce’s corner” is bad enough, but commonly the ColdFusion password has also been forgotten. This happened to me just the other day. So, how do we go about resetting the password?

Back in the ColdFusion 5 days you could edit the registry value:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\software\allaire\coldfusion\currentversion\server

set UseAdminPassword to 0 and restart the ColdFusion service, not forgetting to set a new password afterwards, especially if you’re on a production server.

Now with ColdFusion MX and MX7, you can’t but the process is not too tricky either. In fact there are two methods available to you.

First method:

You need to locate the password.properties file in the C:\CFusionMX7\lib\ directory. Opening the file, you will be presented with something much like this:

#Tue Apr 24 10:41:59 BST 2007
rdspassword=09GTH9 8O&>36& \\Q>[K\=XP \n
password=5BAA61E4C9B93F3F0682250B6CF8331B7EE68FD8
encrypted=true

Change the password to an alpha-numeric string of your choice and encrypted to false, much like this:

#Tue Apr 24 10:41:59 BST 2007
rdspassword=09GTH9 8O&>36& \\Q>[K\=XP \n
password=L3tM31n
encrypted=false

save the file and restart the ColdFusion service, you will be able to get into the ColdFusion Administrator with your chosen password.

Second method:

Locate the neo-security.xml file in the C:\CFusionMX7\lib\ directory. Opening the file you will be presented with a WDDX packet containing ColdFusion server configuration settings. The lines you will need to edit are the following:

<var name=’admin.security.enabled’>
<boolean value=’true’/>
</var>

Change the boolean value to false, like this:

<var name=’admin.security.enabled’>
<boolean value=’false’/>
</var>

save and restart the ColdFusion service. You can now log into the ColdFusion Adminsitrator without a password.

NB It is always recommended that a password be used for production systems.